Pilots and other aircraft crew members rely on many sources of information to accurately and safely plan and prepare for flights. A significant quantity of this information is relatively unchanging with respect to a particular route and/or aircraft, such as distances between fixed points, aircraft capabilities, and airport/runway configurations. However, there is also a large quantity of information that may or may not be important to a pilot based on the particular route being flown, or on the particular phase of flight. For example, a destination airport may be undergoing repair operations on one or more runways, an air show or skydiving operations may be taking place at an alternative airport or other location en route to the final destination, or there may be volcanic ash at certain altitudes due to recent volcano activity in the vicinity of the flight path of the aircraft. This type of information is typically provided to all pilots by a government agency in the form of notices to airmen (NOTAMs).
A typical flight planning scenario might include a pilot receiving ten to fifty pages of NOTAMs prior to the flight. While some of this information may be critically important to one or more phases of the flight being planned, other portions of the information may have no relevance, or limited relevance, to the upcoming flight. The pilot or crew must parse through all of the NOTAMs to manually determine which NOTAMs are applicable to the upcoming flight, and to ascertain the importance of the applicable NOTAMs. Even though conventional airline pilots may have NOTAM information in electronic form utilizing an electronic flight deck, they must still sort through the NOTAMs to match the applicable information to the flight being planned. This process is cumbersome and inefficient, which increases the pilot's workload and creates an opportunity for errors to be made as important information may be missed.
It is with respect to these considerations and others that the disclosure made herein is presented.